A CHRISTIAN’S SUNDAY MORNING PRAYER
My Father and My God!
You are awesome in holiness, wondrous in truth, glorious in goodness, and abundant in mercy!
You are amazing in grace, ineffable in love, and sovereign in redemption.
You alone, O Lord, can and do save sinners from sin, death, and Hell.
You have declared in Your Word that You will save a multitude of sinners from every tribe, tongue, nation, and language of the world!
You alone can and do regenerate the soul and create faith within the heart and impart everlasting life because You, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are the great God! Thank You for salvation! Thank You for granting all Your elect mercy and grace in Christ!
Father, I do love You. I know my love for You is not what it ought to be!
My love is weak, imperfect, feeble, fragile, frail, and sinful, but I do love You because You first loved me!
Strengthen and increase my love for You and Your people, the sheep of Your hand!
O Lord, bless Your sheep with courage and confidence, spiritual strength and holy zeal for the truth!
Grant us greater discernment and wisdom!
Lord Jesus, it is hard to live in this fallen, sin-cursed world, as you know. “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
I find it more and more difficult every day. Strengthen Your people, the sheep of Your pasture, the people of Your hand.
Keep my tongue from gossip, backbiting, and slandering others. O Lord, I am needy, foolish, and weak, and I need You every moment.
“Guide me, O my great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land; I am weak, but you are mighty; hold me with your powerful hand. Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me now and evermore, feed me now and evermore.”
Holy Spirit, bless us to worship You this morning. Give us ears to hear and hearts to believe Your Word.
Bless us as we anticipate gathering as a congregation to exalt Your holy name as You alone are worthy of all honor and praise!
Help all preachers to preach for the glory and praise of Christ and the good of Your sheep!
Give us wisdom, zeal, and understanding so that we might glorify You as we unfold the text of Scripture.
O God, thank You for Your love. Thank You for rescuing all Your people, blessing us, and preserving us in Christ Jesus for Your eternal kingdom! Use me up for the cause of Jesus Christ. Cause me to decrease so that Christ might increase! Exalt Your name, dear Lord, through the ministry of Your Word! Bring reformation and then revival upon Your people, and cause a holy zeal for Your glory and Word to spread like wildfire. Build up Your Church for Your glory, praise, and worship! O Lord, help me, for I am a sheep of Your pasture and I am completely dependent upon You every moment of every day for in You I live and move and have my being! Guide Me, O Great Jehovah!
Thank You, Lord, for hearing my prayer!
May Jesus be exalted.
In His name I pray.
Amen!
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CHURCH IS HARD
*Church is hard for the person walking through the doors, afraid of judgment.
*Church is hard for the pastor’s family, under the microscope of an entire body.
*Church is hard for the prodigal soul returning home, broken and battered by the world.
*Church is hard for the girl who looks like she has it all together, but doesn’t.
*Church is hard for the couple who fought the entire ride to service.
*Church is hard for the single mom, surrounded by couples holding hands, and seemingly perfect families.
*Church is hard for the widow and widower with no invitation to lunch after service.
*Church is hard for the deacon with an estranged child.
*Church is hard for the person singing worship songs, overwhelmed by the weight of the lyrics.
*Church is hard for the man insecure in his role as a leader.
*Church is hard for the wife who longs to be led by a righteous man.
*Church is hard for the young wife who desperately longs for a baby to love.
*Church is hard for the single woman and single man, praying God brings them a spouse.
*Church is hard for the teenage girl, wearing a scarlet letter, ashamed of her sinful choices.
*Church is hard for the sinners.
*Church is hard for me.
It’s hard because on the outside it all looks shiny and perfect, Sunday best in behavior and dress.
However, underneath those layers, you find a body of imperfect people, sinful souls, and selfish motives.
But, here is the beauty of the church—
The Church isn’t a building, mentality, or expectation.
The Church is a body.
The Church is a group of sinners, saved by grace, living in fellowship as saints.
The Church is a body of believers bound as brothers and sisters by the love of God.
The Church is a holy ground where sinful people stand as equals before the Throne of Grace.
The Church is a refuge for broken hearts and a training ground for mighty warriors.
The Church is a converging of confrontation and invitation, where sin is confronted and hearts are invited to seek restoration.
The Church is a lesson in faith and trust, a bearer of burdens and a giver of hope.
The Church is a family coming together, setting aside differences, forgiving past sins, rejoicing in the smallest of victories.
The Church, the body of Christ, and the circle of sinners-turned-saints, is where Christ resides, and if we ask, He is faithful to come.
So even on the hard days as we gather as the church—
The days when I am at odds with a friend, when I’ve fought with my spouse because we’re late once again.
When I’ve walked in bearing burdens heavier than my heart can handle, yet masking the pain with a smile on my face.
When I’ve worn a scarlet letter, under the microscope.
When I’ve longed for a baby to hold, or fought tears as the lyrics were sung.
When I’ve walked back in, afraid and broken, after walking away.
I’ll remember, Christ has never failed and will never fail to meet me there. Revelation 1:12-13, "Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band."
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OUR SPIRITUAL STRUGGLE
~Paul David Tripp
“Every day you need it. You simply can’t live without it. What is it? The heart-convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit.”
I love the hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” I especially appreciate the honest admission and plea of the third verse:
“O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be! Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.”
Here is an honest, excuse-free expression of the spiritual struggle we experience between the grace of conversion and the grace of eternity. It is what we all deal with every day. It’s what causes us to lose our way. It’s what leads us to live in a way that is contradictory to what we profess to believe. It’s what makes us susceptible to temptation. We are all still in possession of wandering hearts.
We would like to think that our hearts are perfectly faithful and true, but they are not. We would like to think that nothing could lure us away from our loyalty to our Lord. We would like to think that our moral commitments are unshakable. We would like to think that what God says is wrong would not be attractive to us. We would like to think that we always think God’s thoughts after him and that our desires are always in the right place. We would like to think all these things. But the problem is that we still have fickle hearts.
You see, our biggest problem is not that we live with flawed people who bring trouble our way. Our great difficulty is not that we live in a fallen world where temptation tends to greet us around every corner. The big issue for us is not that we live in a world that isn’t operating the way God intended, and as a result we face difficulty, disease, suffering, loss, and grief. No, our big difficulty is that sin still resides in our hearts. It still distorts our thoughts and redirects our desires.
The less-than-perfect people, the temptations around us, and the broken world in which we live are problems for us because we have this problem in our hearts. It is humbling, but it is important to remember that it is only ever the sin inside us that hooks us to the sin outside of us.
So, what we need most is not a change of location or relationship, but a fundamental rescue of heart, and that is exactly what God’s grace in the person of the Holy Spirit provides for us.
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REMEMBERING SUNDAYS
by Paul Levy
The fall was a busy season. We were back into school. Ministry activities were up and running. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and nights were drawing in. Tiredness seemed to be ever present and increasing. In a city like London, that can be heightened with people having to commute and long hours. How do we keep fresh?
One of the main answers the Bible gives us is this: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Ex. 20:8; Deut. 5:12). There are feasts in the Old Testament, but no holidays. There are no weekends in the Bible. The rhythm of life was “Six days you shall labor, and one day you shall rest.” It is hardwired into creation and humanity. God took the Sabbath day as a pattern for ours (Gen. 2:1–3).
Of course, rest in Scripture is a rich biblical theme. To truly keep the Sabbath means believing and trusting the Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus Christ (Matt. 12:1; Mark 2:23; Luke 6:1). It means resting from our own works and trusting in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. It means recognizing that rest can truly be found only in Christ, by Christ, through Christ. The offer of the gospel is “come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Ultimately, we look forward to that eternal rest, the Sabbath that is still to come. We mustn’t be content with outward conformity, but rather have hearts that receive God’s Word, so that we enter into His rest (Heb. 4:6–7).
That new age that Christ ushered in when He rose from the dead has begun, but we’re not there in its entirety yet. This life is still one where painful toil is present, a fallen world of thorns and thistles, of commuting delays and difficult bosses, overwhelming workloads and deadlines, challenging children and housework, and frustration with life.
Christ’s resurrection on the first day of the week changes the Sabbath day. We no longer work during the week looking forward to rest. We work out of the rest that Christ has won for us. We look back to creation and God’s redemption in history but now rejoice in Christ’s resurrection, the completion of His work. Christ rose on the first day of the week (John 20:19). He appeared to His disciples on the first day of the week (John 20:26). The early Christians met on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7). They laid aside their money to give on the first day of the week (1 Cor. 16:1–2), and by the time we come to Revelation, John finds himself describing it as the Lord’s Day (Rev. 1:10). It seems that the emphasis moves from rest to worship with the transition from Sabbath to Lord’s Day; however, both must be present.
One of the helps that God has given us to deal with the pressures of life and tiredness is to take a Sabbath day. We live in a city that never stops, where people live at an unsustainable pace. The most consistent answer to the question “How are you?” is “Tired.” It has become our gut reaction, even when it’s not true. In fact, some of us feel guilty when we’re not tired.
I want to really encourage us to make use of the Lord’s Day, to be determined in making the most of it. That is going to mean preparing for it. I have found that if I can think through what needs to be done on a Saturday to enable me to not have to work on a Sunday, it frees me up. If I want to make the most of Sundays, I’ll go to bed earlier on a Saturday.
In a world where weekends away are sacrosanct, as Christians we’ll be different because there’s a day that we want to spend with God’s people, worshiping together. That’s our priority.
There is no command in Scripture about how long we’re supposed to be at church or how often we meet on Sundays, but I think framing the Lord’s Day by gathering for worship in the morning and the evening with the Lord’s people is for both our and the church’s good. It has certainly been the wisdom of the church for centuries.
We try to encourage people to visit each other’s homes. Build community. Invest in relationships. Care for the lonely and spend time with the people with whom God has knitted you together. Eat food you love. Read books that help you love the Lord. Enjoy the creation that God has given. Welcome strangers. Put aside your work.
There are challenges for families, but making Sunday the best day of the week is really important. It’s a day to show our children what really matters in life. I would argue that how we spend our Sundays reveals what our priorities are. It is what we are excited about that our children will see as they grow up, not just what we teach them.
I want to plead for two things. The first: Put sports in their place. We live in a culture that thinks athletics are far too important. Sports are a good gift from God, but they are to be enjoyed and not worshiped. The reality is that for many of us, sports have become an idol. Worshiping God with God’s people is infinitely more important than sports. Some of us may need to ask ourselves the question, Why am I so reluctant to have my devotion to sports questioned?
The second thing would be to put work, and particularly schoolwork, in its place. God has given us a day when we don’t have to feel guilty about not doing work. Learn the lesson that we are not defined by our work. Refuse to believe that we must disregard God’s command to prosper. It’s a damaging lie. Sunday is to be a day when the pressure of work is off.
I remember a discussion with students once where this truth that God has given us a day when we don’t have to study and we can rest was being applied. The response from a couple of the students was, “We don’t want to be legalistic about that.” The Bible leader again stated the great blessing that it is not to have to work, but we can rest and not have to feel guilty about it. The sad response was, “We don’t want to be legalistic about that.” The offer of gracious, refreshing rest was missed.
I don’t have (and I hope you don’t have) any interest in morbid, miserable Sabbaths. Jesus certainly didn’t. There are things that we shouldn’t do because it’s the Lord’s Day—of that there’s no doubt—but our mindset must be that we get to worship with God’s people. We get to rest from our work. We get to remember creation, redemption, and salvation and to long for that eternal rest.
Sundays are like a trailer for a film or a taster for a menu. One day, every day will be like Sunday taken up with Jesus and His praise.
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LOVE NOT THE WORLD
“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
—1 John 2:15
ONE MAJOR PROBLEM with the Church of Jesus Christ in our day is that too many church members are in love with the world. Instead of living a life that’s contrary to the ways of this present evil world (Romans 12:2), too many professing Christians think like the world thinks and therefore live as the world lives. However, John wrote in our text to “love not the world or the things in the world.” John sets before us two loves: love for God, and love for the world, and he says these two loves are diametrically opposed to one another so you can’t love God and the world at the same time. “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4).
WHEN JOHN USES the word “world”, he’s referring to the world order or the sphere of humanity that’s spiritually dead in sin and at war with God, His Son, His Word, and His Church. It’s a realm of humanity that lies under the sway of the Wicked One (1 John 5:19). Jesus called Satan the prince of this world in John 12:31. The “world” is the city of man, his institutions, and vain philosophies (Col. 2:8), which are controlled by Satan. We read in James 3:14 that the wisdom of the world “is earthly, sensual, and demonic.” The Apostle Paul said, “the wisdom of this world is foolishness” in 1 Cor. 3:19, and John says in our text, “love not this world!” Beloved in Christ, the world is not your friend! You are at war with the ways of this world even as the world is at war with you. Jesus said in John 15:19, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” The world is preoccupied with pursuing profit, pleasure, and positions. It worships the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1) and it shakes its fist in God’s face and says, “I will live my life the way I want to live my life. Nobody is going to tell me how to live!” Abortion, homosexuality, same sex marriage, feminism, evolution, idolatry, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, etc. (Gal. 5:19-21) are all “ways of this world.” And John says the world operates along three pathways: “the lust of flesh, the lust of eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16).
WHAT ARE YOUR DESIRES? Is the lust of the flesh controlling your life? Is sex, drugs, alcohol, money, or the lust for power, pleasure or position ruling your life? John says you can’t live like that and truly love God. What do your desires and appetites reveal about who you are and what you love? “If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1-3). If your love is for the things of the world, then repent, and ask God to cleanse you from all unrighteousness, and know that when you ask for forgiveness “God is faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Friday Devotional: June 13, 2025
In Christ,
Pastor S. Henry
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WORSHIP THE LORD!
“Make a joyful shout to the LORD, all you lands! Serve the LORD with gladness; come before His presence with singing” … “Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise.”
—Psalm 100
ONE MARK of a true believer is delight in the worship of God. How you respond to worship on the Lord’s Day reveals what is going on in your soul. If you’d rather be some other place when the church gathers on the Lord’s Day for public worship then you reveal, at worst, a heart of unbelief, or at best, a heart of a spiritual infant. Every Sunday morning, we ought to sing these words, “Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands. Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.” We ought to delight to “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.”
BY GOD'S GRACE, believers are those being conformed into the very image of Jesus Christ, and Jesus was never burdened by worship. He was never burdened to hear the Word of God. Therefore, as believers, we ought to delight in the worship of God by hearing His Word on the Lord’s Day. Parents, you must teach this principle to your children. They must learn what a great joy and wonderful privilege and blessing it is to gather with a congregation that faithfully stands on the truth of God's Word. Parents, if you don’t rejoice in worshipping God, neither will your children. You must teach your children to cultivate a spirit of worship for the true and living God out of a thankful heart.
TODAY THERE IS such a famine for the preaching of God’s Word and a famine for the hearing of God’s Word. Too many “preachers” don’t preach the Word of God, and too many church members don’t desire to hear God’s Word preached, and yet they call themselves followers of Christ? The duty of a follower of Christ is to obey His Word. Jesus said in John 10, “My sheep hear my voice, and they follow Me.” And the sheep hear Christ’s voice on Sunday morning when the preacher faithfully proclaims God’s Word. Therefore, every believer has a responsibility to be in a place of worship on Sunday morning where the Word of God is faithfully preached and taught in order that they might bow their necks in faithful obedience to the God who has saved their soul by the person and work of Jesus Christ. As believers, we must be seen ‘entering into His gates with thanksgiving” and we must be heard entering “into his courts with praise.”
Tuesday Encouragement: June 10, 2025
In Christ,
Pastor S. Henry
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"Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said: "This is now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
—Genesis 2:22-23
"There are at least five ways the Bible distinguishes between male and female. We can remember these differences using the letters ABCDE.
(2) The Body is the second difference. Where the world wants us to believe that our bodies tell us nothing permanent or obligatory about ourselves, the Bible says just the opposite. There is a fittedness to our bodily design. Part of being a man is that your body was designed for a woman; part of being a woman is that your body was designed for a man (Lev. 18:22; Rom. 1:26–27). The body must not be altered to fit our own sense of identity. Our bodies are given, not identified or chosen by us, and they are given to us to be used for God’s glory (1 Cor. 6:19)."
—Kevin DeYoung
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